No, that's not a list of what happened in a weird dream last night. That is the LINEUP of a NYC show at Bowery Ballroom on May 22nd in celebration of the tenth anniversary of Michael Azerrad's "classic history of the '80s indie underground", Our Band Could Be Your Life (a book everyone reading this site should probably own!)

To quote show co-presenter Tiger Mountain Presents, "some of the best bands in contemporary indie music will play songs by each of the 13 bands in the book."

"For years, all kinds of people -- musicians, people who run labels, concert promoters, journalists, whatever -- have told me that they've been very inspired by Our Band Could Be Your Life and the bands it profiles, which is incredibly gratifying and totally unexpected," says Azerrad. "The tenth anniversary of the book was a great occasion for the current generation of bands to celebrate these pioneers."

wow way to completely shit on the memory of these bands by having stupid hipster bands cover them. sounds like the biggest waste of time ever. enjoy all of the ironic staches pretending they were around for this back in the day.

The LCD Soundsystem ticketing debacle for their final show at Madison Square Garden raised the hackles of an entire music community, from the fans who were bested for tickets, on up through various press outlets and commentators, all the way to James Murphy himself. Aspersions were hurled via twitter, blog posts, and articles from all members of the music community as everyone searched in desperation for a whipping boy for their collective disappointment.

Now that the dust has settled, fans mostly pacified by the addition of four shows at Terminal 5, and Murphy back out of the internet’s limelight, there still hangs an unnamed bad vibe over February 11th’s general on-sale date for the MSG show, and no clear verdict of what went wrong. For many, scalpers took the brunt of the blame, and rightfully so. But as with any dubious enterprise, there’s never just scapegoats on the street acting independent of a system — they are given the freedom to act this way because of incentives afforded to them. What force, economic or otherwise, allows ticket prices to inflate in after market marketplaces? How have the economics of the music industry shifted so much pressure on the economics of a live event? What can be done to fix this increasingly broken ticketing economy?

Spurred on in part by a letter penned by Bob Lefsetz – the music community’s man behind the curtain– a speculative case started to build against The Bowery Presents who promoted the MSG event for LCD Soundsystem. The Bowery Presents controlled the quantity of tickets put on sale (less the tickets allocated by the AmEx pre-sale and other tickets held up directly through Ticketmaster). Lefsetz purports, in a step by step process, that the mastermind behind the shortage of tickets is the promoter LCD Soundsystem chose for the final concert, The Bowery Presents. In sum, Lefsetz suggests that, instead of scalpers snatching up thousands of tickets in mere seconds, The Bowery Presents withheld tickets and disseminated them to aftermarket ticketing outlets.

Looking for clarity on this issue, Consequence of Sound reached out to Lefsetz. He declined to comment. However, another member of the music community spoke candidly on the topic. An independent promoter, who asked for their name and company to be withheld, talked with us at length on this issue and many others concerning the state of the music industry today.

“When people go to a concert, they don’t think about who the promoter is, or care, so there’s really very little incentive for any promoter to not [withhold tickets],” the promoter explains. “If they can mitigate the risk by not only letting it happen, but helping it happen, they kind of will. I don’t see why they wouldn’t.”

The promoter admits this is not done on a purely selfish level. For a promoter to ignore the declivitous trends in the music industry would be just bad business. For quick reference and context, here are some figures from a recent and terrifying article in The Business Insider:

Ten years ago, the average American spent almost three times as much on recorded music products as they do today.
In 2009, the average American purchased just over one album per person per year, and only 0.25 downloaded albums per year.
The music industry is down 64% from its peak
And then there’s this:

Hey 2:47pm, I'm pretty sure Ian would stop the show midway through a song and tell you to get the fuck out of the room for sounding like a violent, ignorant asshole.

Love,
2:47

ps - Even though those bands probably wouldn't charge $1,000 for a ticket, I'd gladly hand that much over to them as a show of thanks for all the greatness they've brought into my life. So yah, you still sound cheap and ungrateful. I sound like someone who couldn't cares so little about money that I'd willingly give it to three bands who deserve it after putting up with all the bullshit the music industry put them through back then.

“The economics aren’t that complicated if you think about it,” the promoter continues. “It can quite simply be said that the old model was: ‘Put out an album, we go out on tour to promote sales of the album. Now we tour, and put out an album to promote sales of concert tickets.’ Bands used to make a huge amount of money selling music and getting advances from the label. Now they make almost nothing. And so, they have to charge the promoter a higher guarantee [artists' fee] to book at, and then the promoter has to charge ticket buyers higher amount to to get to the concert. And because of that, the promoter is incentivized to work with the scalpers.”

Scalpers, in this new economic model, are fast becoming useful tools for this one promoter trying to account for the increased capital needed to fund an event marred by increased guarantees and a sagging music industry.

“The promoter in me, that’s struggling to get to their break-even point, and has a show that is looking more promising, we’re incentivized to collude with the scalpers. As an independent, we’ve made relationships with [aftermarket ticketing brokers] to sell a bulk amount of tickets upfront at a discount.”

Increased scalping activity for a show increases the perception that the concert might be more successful than it actually is. Look no further than the press LCD Soundsystem received from their show. His eloquent and populist blog post entitled “fuck you scalpers, terminal 5 shows added” was widely republished across music and entertainment blogs, and while parts of the post were generously self-effacing and apologetic, much of the focus was geared profanely to scalpers. Most apt is how Murphy calls into question the ethics of the scalpers at the end of his post:

oh—and a small thing to scalpers: “it’s legal” is what people say when they don’t have ethics. the law is there to set the limit of what is punishable (aka where the state needs to intervene) but we are supposed to have ethics, and that should be the primary guiding force in our actions, you fucking fuck.” [sic]

In addition to perceived buzz, putting tickets in the hands of scalpers takes some of the burden off the promoters to make their goal.

“Say we have a ticket for $30,” the promoter starts. “If we could sell on day one, or on day zero, before tickets ever go on sale, if we can sell 500 of those tickets to a scalper for $25, that takes a lot of our risk off of our shoulders. And we want to be doing more of that to be quite honest, and we’ve discussed that. [...] Scalpers get potentially sell out tickets at cheaper, and the promoter gets revenue in the door at day zero. So there’s a conversation happening.”

Hey 2:47pm, I'm pretty sure Ian would stop the show midway through a song and tell you to get the fuck out of the room for sounding like a violent, ignorant asshole.

Love,
2:14

ps - Even though those bands probably wouldn't charge $1,000 for a ticket, I'd gladly hand that much over to them as a show of thanks for all the greatness they've brought into my life. So yah, you still sound cheap and ungrateful. I sound like someone who couldn't cares so little about money that I'd willingly give it to three bands who deserve it after putting up with all the bullshit the music industry put them through back then.

When I pressed the promoter about the ethics of colluding with scalpers, with regards to the ethics of the LCD Soundsystem show, the promoter responded:

“The reason we’re able to sleep at night is because we’re not selling out. If things don’t sell out, we’re almost shifting a big amount of the risk to the scalper….For the smaller promoter, it’s something where we’re not pricing out any fans. It’s a situation where, if the break-even point is 3,000 paid ticket buyers, and there’s only 2,500 people [speculated] in demand, and the capacity [of the venue] is 5,000, then there’s no one who, if they want a ticket, will have to buy from that scalper. But we have to let the scalper speculate by buying our ticket up front, because otherwise we’ll never get to that 3,000, and that show will never happen again. But if they’re the only thing, if they’re buying 500 tickets up front at a discount, if that’s the only thing between us losing money and not losing money, why wouldn’t we do it if it doesn’t price out any consumers?”

In a faltering music industry, we also have to examine the ethics of a common practice that many in the music community participate in: pirating. Even a dated 2007 report states that global music piracy causes $12.5 billion of economic losses every year, 71,060 U.S. jobs lost, a loss of $2.7 billion in workers’ earnings, and a loss of $422 million in tax revenues, $291 million in personal income tax, and $131 million in lost corporate income and production taxes (via). Couple this with the exponential growth of the internet and the figures above, recent years could only produce equal, if not greater figures.

The promoter spoke to and took ownership of this problem, saying, “If people weren’t pirating music, it wouldn’t come to this. That is literally step one in this entire situation. As a consumer, I know I’m part of the problem that led to the situation I know deal with as a promoter, but the young generation just feels entitled.”

Alternative solutions were discussed, but each one demands some sort of a sacrifice from members of the music syndicate. We discussed artists working on more of a commission on the back-end (“The band makes X amount of dollars, and then they make 40% of revenue after the concert promoter gets to their break-even point. Every promoter wishes musicians were more accepting of that fee structure. But band’s know, increasingly, because they’re not making money anywhere else, relative to how it was 20 years ago, they need more money up front.”), paperless ticketing (“Paperless tickets — that concertgoer isn’t going to buy six tickets the day of the show if he can’t sell them later at equal to or less than face-value in case something happens. It gives someone a new reason not to buy a ticket.”), and dynamic ticket pricing (“the more price points the ticketing agency has on the supply and demand curve, the more total revenue you’ll bring in the door”).

The graph above is one side of the equation, and over the last decade, the ethically elastic music community has somehow balanced it. Each stone cast from a fan to a band, from a promoter to a venue, from an agent to the record label only bruises the community and continues to balance the steady decline of this industry. If the music community ever wants to reverse the trends of this grab, it will take a much more united front then the one it exists on today. Indeed, ethics should be the guiding force in our actions, and that goes for the entire suffering community — piraters on up.

So what was supposed to be the swan song celebration of a band ending its tenure as one of the most influential acts of the past decade digressed into a mud-flinging, price gauging, profiteering mess. The Bowery Presents and LCD Soundsystem’s management were reached for comment, but did not respond to our request. As one friend intimated to me, we’ll never know what went down unless the wrong person gets drunk and tells the right person.

But, if Lefsetz is correct in his theory, is it any wonder why The Bowery Presents would have allocated tickets to someone other than fans for a perceived sellout and a possible bump in capital? The promoter weighed in: “Ticketmaster, with the most sophisticated economic system that exists in the world, did it on purpose. That says something. That means it’s beneficial to the model. Everybody needs to do it — the industry is hurting.”

hopefully some of the members of some of these past bands will speak up and stop this before what they did and accomplished is shat on by smug hipsters who want to trivialize it (not that they see that) by having these completely mismatched bands do stupid indie "interpretations" of the music. if you go to this you're literally a buffoon.

would dan deacon and titus andronicus and dirty projectors like to see their songs covered by avril lavigne and katy perry? because that is esentially what they're doing to the music that they're covering.

The funny part about all this is that most of these bands would seriously fuck up the bands who will be covering them back in the day. St. Vincent would end up being slammed in the van with a beefy dick shoved down her throat if she showed up at a Big Black show and got all groupie on them.

Y'all're acting like someone stuck Muhammad into a frame of Garfield. Jesus. Get over your fundamentalism, wash the amber out of your ears, learn to love new perspectives and hope for the best. The world does not exist to please you, thank God.

I think all of you are forgetting a little album called "Rise Above" by Dirty Projectors from way back in 2007. In it, they geniusly reinterpreted Damaged FROM MEMORY. If that isn't hardcore, I don't know what is. What is?

I love that book and most of the bands profiled. Kinda sucks that this show is showcasing a very particular branch of who those bands influenced. I'm with 3:15 and 3:18. Throwing awesome bands through the hipster grinder.

a band like Screaming Females should be a part of this instead of the lame bullshit playing now. how about a band with at least some sort of underground history to them instead of today's equivalent of Better Than Ezra

wait? Im confused... this blog generally covers the aforementioned 'puss indie' bands... that's why you're all here... to read about these bands... if you ask me, it's blogs like these that's diluted the hardcore authenticity of such bands as fugazi, who would never partake in such hypocrisy as goes on here.. this bickering comes off as pretentious, you guys realize that?... you're on this website because you want to be part of a "scene"... those bands werent about "scenes"... just loud, abrasive music... these pussy indies bands that have been billed to do these covers function a lot better in this environment that you guys have created... they're easily accessible, as well as easily forgettable (with the exception of a couple) after all we come here to read about 30 new bands each and every day... where as the subjects of this book would have been enough musical content to satisfy a generation of an entire decade, or more-- just a few really good bands..

I bet almost every person who posted in this thread thinks the same as you. The only difference is that every poster here is a troll. The problem is that it's all trolls trolling each other on this website, so kind of pointless.

They quite literally talk about these bands every week on this website. So, my question is: Why are all you "hardcore, been-there-since-back-in-the-day, cooler than thou, etc." complainers on a website devoted to shitty bands anyway? Don't you have some reminiscing to do involving a twelver' of Bush, your old leather jacket and the tape deck of an Econoline with only half the seats?

P.S. - the original music will still sound the same! So don't go if you don't want to hear it.

YO some of the bands (and by some I probably mean Titus Ted Leo and one or two others) should surprise encore a Nirvana set at the shows conclusion. Because honestly how do you choose which band goes last? Also Nirvana is the natural progression if the groundwork laid down by the Our Band acts, etc.

Forgive me for my inability to backlash effectively, but I am having trouble seeing how its such a terrible thing for new indie bands to cover old ones. Just because they're young whippersnappers doesn't mean they can't do something interesting with the material. This whole idea seems to jive pretty well with the spirit of the book that they're celebrating.

If I bring my Ramones Rocket To Russia can I get billing as "Anonymous plays Ramones"? What a cheap shit idea. Hey -- I know ... let's all play cover songs and say it's a big deal. I'd rather go to Charlie Sheen at RCMH night #2

Not sure what this is all about, but Dan Deacon playing The Butthole Surfers is a Wet Dream. I can't wait to hear what kind of Dan Deacon flavor he adds to the BHS classics. I would never have imagined this in million years, and my dreams have come true.

Too bad this show will be full of aged uptight hipsters watching the stage through their iphones / digital cameras. With their Obnoxious long haired toddlers running around with "misfits" baby tee's. shitting on the floor.